A Sovereign Helicone Alternative
Helicone shows you what your model calls cost and did. The Scrydon AI Gateway decides what they may do — every call running as a person, screened, capped and audited in your perimeter — and follows the call into the tools your agents use next.
Helicone started as observability for LLM applications — a proxy that logs every request, prices it, and turns the result into dashboards — and has grown a gateway around it with caching, rate limits and routing, open source and self-hostable. It is very good at showing you what happened. The Scrydon AI Gateway is built to decide what may happen, to a person's clearance, inside your perimeter. It stands alone and can be deployed on its own.
Read this if you're a team that adopted Helicone to see its spend and is now being asked by security and finance for controls rather than charts.
Deploy the AI Gateway Starts at €500 / month on a yearly commitment, deployed on its own in a day.
The Scrydon AI Gateway is a sovereign alternative to Helicone: a single governed endpoint that speaks the standard model APIs so existing tools reach any model unchanged, where every call runs under the caller's own federated identity rather than a key with caller-supplied properties, against a clearance-gated model allowlist, with data loss prevention, a spend cap and an immutable audit trail — and with spend, calls, tokens and carbon reported per person, model, capability and workflow. It shares one policy and one audit chain with governed tool calls and sandbox egress, and runs air-gapped, on-premises or on a European sovereign cloud.
Helicone is a well-liked product with an honest origin: put a proxy in front of your model calls, log everything, price it, and show it. Around that it has added the things a gateway needs — caching, rate limits, routing across providers, prompt tooling — and it is open source with a self-hosted option. Its limits are the limits of an observability-first design. Attribution is by key and by whatever properties the caller chooses to attach, so a dashboard can be as honest as the headers; observation is not enforcement, so a spend chart is not a cap and a log is not a policy; governance ends at the model call, while an agent's day is mostly tool calls; and the control plane is the vendor's unless you self-host. The Scrydon AI Gateway keeps the visibility — spend, calls, tokens and carbon per developer, model, capability and workflow, with an on-pace projection — and makes it enforcement: a gateway key minted against a named person in your identity provider, the allowlist following that person's clearance, every call screened and metered against a cap before the answer lands, and the same identity governing the tools the agent calls over MCP and the network its sandbox may reach.
Runs as a Person, Not a Key
Every call resolves through your identity provider to the human who made it — so attribution is a property of the platform, not of headers a caller remembered to send.
Visibility That Enforces
Spend, calls, tokens and carbon per developer and per model, an on-pace projection, and a monthly cap enforced before the answer lands — not after the chart is read.
Sovereign by Deployment
Air-gapped, on-premises or a European sovereign cloud, with open-weight models on your own hardware behind the same endpoint.
Helicone Alternative in the Scrydon platform
One integrated, sovereign architecture. Here is where Helicone Alternative sits — highlighted against the full stack it works with.
The AI OS for Humans & AI Agents
Ontology & Semantic Layer, one connected model for your data, knowledge & processes
Combining the best of data lakes, data warehouses and search
Governed access to every model, and the agents & workflows that execute across your systems
Integrate across A2A, MCP, legacy systems and data sources
Secure domain federation, trusted data sharing, and cross-boundary intelligence
Sovereign Foundations
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What Helicone observes, and what the AI Gateway enforces on the same request
Helicone's strength is that it shows you the truth about your model calls: every request logged and priced, dashboards by key, user and property, and a gateway grown around the proxy with caching, rate limits and routing, open source and self-hostable. The Scrydon AI Gateway keeps that visibility — spend, calls, tokens and carbon per developer, model, capability and workflow — and makes it enforcement: the call runs as a named person from your identity provider, the model allowlist follows that person's clearance, data loss prevention screens what leaves, the turn is metered against a cap before the answer lands, and the audit record settles before the stream finishes. The vendor key is never issued to anyone.
The standard APIs, unchanged tools — Both are adopted by changing a base URL and speak the APIs coding agents and applications already use.
Identity from your provider, not from headers — Helicone attributes a call to a key and the properties the caller attaches. The AI Gateway mints keys against a named person in your identity provider, so attribution cannot be forgotten or forged.
Policy at dispatch, on every call — A clearance-gated allowlist decides which models this person may reach; data loss prevention and moderation run inline; the turn is metered against the organisation's cap before the answer lands.
The same chain for tools and egress — When the agent calls a system over MCP or runs code in a sandbox, the same credential model, policy snapshot and audit trail apply — an observability proxy sees the model call and nothing else.
When a dashboard is asked to be a control
Helicone is a fair choice for a product team that needs to see what its model calls cost and did, and it is often the first thing such a team installs. The gap opens when the dashboard is asked to be a control. Attribution by header is as honest as the headers; a chart of last month's spend is not a ceiling on this month's; a log of a model call says nothing about the tool calls the agent made afterwards against systems that hold your data; and none of it is a policy an auditor can read. The Scrydon AI Gateway is built for the moment the question changes from what happened to what may happen: every call attributable to a person by the platform, a model allowlist and a spend cap enforced at dispatch, one audit chain across the model call, the tools the agent calls and the sandbox it runs in, deployed where your production runs — and deployable on its own before anything else is.
Scrydon AI Gateway vs Helicone
Both sit on the path of every model call and both show you the cost. The difference is whether the thing on the path can say who the person is and refuse.
| Capability | Scrydon | Helicone |
|---|---|---|
| Who the call runs as | The person, resolved through your identity provider, with their own delegated grants | A key, plus caller-supplied user and property headers |
| Model calls governed | Clearance-gated allowlist, DLP, moderation, cap and immutable audit on every call | Logging and pricing of every call, rate limits, caching, routing; guardrails as add-ons |
| Tool calls governed | Same identity, policy and audit chain as the model call | Not in that path |
| Network egress from the sandbox | Enforced outside the workload, which cannot reconfigure it | Out of scope |
| Where the vendor key lives | On the platform; never issued to a developer | Sent by the application, or stored with the gateway |
| Cost attribution | Per person, per team or unit, and per turn, by model, capability and workflow, with an on-pace projection and an enforced cap | Per key, user and property, with detailed dashboards; alerts rather than enforcement |
| Deployment | Sovereign — air-gapped, on-premises or European cloud | Hosted service; open source and self-hostable |
| Pricing model | Fixed monthly fee for the cluster that carries your people, excluding hosting | Free and usage-based plans on the hosted service; open source to self-host |
A category comparison, written to orient: Helicone is a good product at what it set out to do and we would not pretend otherwise. Helicone is a trademark of its owners; capabilities evolve — verify current details with the vendor.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Helicone for a regulated organisation?+
How is the AI Gateway different from Helicone?+
Do we lose Helicone's dashboards?+
Helicone is open source and self-hostable. Why the AI Gateway?+
Can we start with just the AI Gateway?+
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